by Edie Claire
Leigh looked at the younger woman thoughtfully. Mrs. Rhodis had insisted that her grandson had a heart of gold. Could he actually have been telling the truth?
Before she could get in another question, a stooped older man emerged from the first exam room, dragging an immense shaggy hound behind him. Nancy went back to work, and Leigh decided to try her luck with the rest of the staff.
She quickly ruled out Jeanine, Dr. Koslow's senior tech and self-proclaimed dental hygienist, who was busily working on an anesthetized greyhound in the treatment room. Jeanine was a devoted worker and a competent technician, but she was also a smug, brown-nosing snitch, and Leigh didn't care to have a transcript of their conversation relayed to Dr. Koslow later. When a quick search of the back revealed that the other veterinary assistants were all working in the exam rooms, Leigh headed down the narrow basement stairs.
Her arrival in the kennels was greeted by the broad smile of Jared Loomis, who spoke as always without a moment's interruption to his current task. "Hello, Leigh Koslow! How are you doing, Leigh Koslow? Did you hear about the guy who was arrested, Leigh Koslow?"
Leigh smiled back. She adored Jared, who, though he was born with Down Syndrome, was nobody’s charity case. At six foot three and two-hundred fifty pounds, his shuffling gait and odd speech patterns might have made another young man seem threatening. But with his amiable manner, fluffy head of pale blond hair, and immense blue eyes, Jared was more akin to a giant cherub. More importantly to Dr. Koslow, he had a wonderful way with animals and a work ethic second only to God.
"Hello, Jared," Leigh said pleasantly. "I'm doing fine. And yes, I did hear about the arrest. But I don't know much. What more can you tell me?" She took hold of the stainless-steel water dish Jared had removed from a cage and went to fill it up for him.
"Thank you, Leigh Koslow. A guy hid in here 'cause he was stealing drugs, Dr. Koslow says. A guy was stealing drugs and the alarm went off and the police came."
"Where do you think he hid?"
The big young man grinned at her as he took the full water pail and placed it in the cage he had just coated with fresh newspaper. "I don't know, Leigh Koslow. I think he hid in the paper cage. What do you think, Leigh Koslow?"
Leigh grinned back. Jared was modest, but not without insight. She walked over to the corner kennel, which had not been used for a dog in years, both because its chain-link gate was hopelessly off its hinges and because the floor drain had a tendency to back up in the spring. It had long since been designated the "paper cage," and was used to store the reams of used newspapers the staff collected for the cage bottoms.
"Papers were messed up, Leigh Koslow," Jared called to her as he looped a leash over the head of a dachshund and led it out for a few moments of freedom. She pressed farther into the kennel and could see that the wooden pallets on which the newspapers were stacked had been pushed askew, leaving a narrow crawl space behind that no casual glance would have noticed. She considered, then stepped out. "Did you see anything else unusual when you came in this morning?"
He nodded, then dropped to his hands and knees, pushing his head and massive shoulders into the Dachshund's cage to wipe it clean. "There was stuff on the floor, Leigh Koslow," he said, his voice a tinny echo. "Cat carrier on the floor. Bag on the floor. I never leave stuff on the floor. Dr. Koslow says it's not safe to leave stuff on the floor."
She distracted the dachshund, who had begun to nip playfully at the young man's heels as he worked. "A cat carrier, you said?"
Jared's head emerged and he pointed to a spot near the large metal trash can in the middle of the room. "Cat carrier on the floor there." He then pointed to a spot by his feet. "Trash bag on the floor here. I cleaned them up. Dr. Koslow said to clean them up."
Leigh's walked over to the stairs and sat down to think as Jared filled the dog's cage with clean paper, fresh dishes, and a bedraggled yellow towel. As soon as the dachshund's kibble was visible, it scooted back into its cage and dove in with relish. Jared was certainly a conscientious kennel cleaner, she mulled, so if he hadn't left the things out, who did?
Randall always kept a spare cardboard cat carrier sitting on top of the basement refrigerator, primarily to avoid puncture wounds on those naive new cat owners who thought they could hold Snowball in their lap while sitting next to a rottweiler. But why would Ricky Rhodis need one? A bulky cardboard box would hardly be Leigh's choice for carrying around a stash of drug bottles, needles, and syringes—particularly if one planned on making an inconspicuous getaway. Point one: Ricky.
"Jared," she began again. "That trash bag you said you found on the floor. Was it empty?"
"Cat poop, Leigh Koslow," he answered matter of factly. "Nothing but litter and cat poop. Isn't that funny, Leigh Koslow?"
She frowned. For a person who made their living coming up with catchy ways to sell everything from baby food to industrial solvents, she was shamefully lacking in ideas as to why either the police or Ricky Rhodis would have deigned to empty the clinic's litter pans. Might her father have gotten bored while the police were investigating and picked up a scoop? Not likely. Even then, he would have thrown the bag away.
Heavy footsteps started down the stairs, and she looked around behind her. "Hello, Leigh," Jeanine greeted brusquely, her tight, patronizing smile in full form. "You heard about what happened last night, I guess. It was bound to happen, if you ask me, as crazy as that waiting room gets."
Leigh smiled tolerantly. It was no secret that Jeanine was more than a little jealous of Nancy's unparalleled rise through the staff hierarchy—never mind that one of the business manager's first actions had been to suggest offering the technicians full benefits. "Could you tell Jared to bring up Meno, the other greyhound? Briar's Joy will be ready to come down in five."
"I'll get her," Leigh offered, grabbing a spare lead from a hook on the wall and looking around at the cage tags. She noticed that there weren't many sick animals in the kennels—just a few boarders and the dental patients who came in every Friday for a spot on Jeanine's Saturday-morning cleaning roster. Spying a red brindle greyhound, she checked the cage tag for any aspersions to its good nature and opened the door. As she was looping the lead over the dog's narrow snout, Mrs. Rhodis' words floated back to her.
He said he was returning something that belonged to someone else.
She led the willing greyhound up the stairs for the handoff, then pounded quickly back down. "Jared," she asked hopefully. "Are these all the same animals that were here last night?"
"Doberman went home this morning, Leigh Koslow," he answered automatically, as if reciting from a roster. "Doberman went home this morning. He was here. Siamese and greyhounds here for Jeanine. Black cat sick, sick—he’s been here. Dachshund, sheltie, they’ve been here."
She looked around at the assembled furry guests, her heartbeat quickening. A cat carrier, eh? Clearly, the Doberman and the greyhounds were off the hook. So was the sheltie, and the dachshund was on the large side, too. That left the cats.
She peered in for a closer look at the "sick, sick" black cat, which lay limply against the far wall of his cage, an IV line trailing from his forearm. His glittering green eyes watched Leigh with distrust, and his upper lip drew back over his teeth with a faint hiss. Jones, Midnight: Kidney failure, the cage card read. She narrowed her eyes in concentration, trying to think up a good reason why Ricky Rhodis would steal an old, sick cat from a veterinary clinic.
She couldn't. Not aside from garden-variety insanity, which, prevalent as it was among the clinic's clientele, would be a tough line to sell her father. Her attention turned to the double-wide cage next door, which housed two silent Siamese. This she knew immediately to be unusual, since although the breed had many virtues, silence was not among them. Neither was healthy gums, which probably explained the silence.
Both lay sleeping soundly, their limbs splayed straight out in the distinctive position of those recovering from anesthesia. "You said the Siamese were here for dentals?" she a
sked Jared, who had moved on to mop the vacant greyhound run.
He looked up briefly, then answered while he worked the mop wringer. "The Siamese got dentals, Leigh Koslow."
Leigh took another look at the cats, both of which were handsome seal points with bright, slick fur and angular lines. Her eyes drank in the cage card with a flicker of alarm. Murchison.
Lilah Murchison. The tiniest of shivers traveled down her spine, and she shrugged quickly to arrest it. She was thirty-one years old now, not six and a half. And it was clear to her rational, adult self that the incident that had given her years of nightmares was no more than a little girl’s imagination gone amuck.
But still.
She had been an energetic child with a healthy amount of curiosity, and the gigantic ladies’ purse that sat unattended in exam room two had proved more temptation than she could take. It was a foot wide easily, both sides covered with sequined renditions of sapphire-eyed, seal-point Siamese. She had run her fingers over the shiny designs, then popped open the top for a quick peek inside. Wallet, keys, makeup mirror—she sifted through each component, bringing it out into the light. She thought the squishy object in the plastic bag was probably a half-eaten sandwich. It was only after she held it inches from her face that she realized it was a mauled, bloody, and notably headless mouse.
She didn’t scream then. She had simply frozen in horror. It was when two sets of extraordinarily long red fingernails clamped down on her shoulders and a husky woman’s voice said "boo," that she had become slightly hysterical. She had whirled around to see a grown woman in a leopard-spotted minidress and thigh-high boots laughing at her hysterically, and that had been all she could take.
It wasn’t the sort of story one confessed to a parent. She had, after all, been snooping in someone else’s purse, which everyone knew could result in jail time. But the assessment of the first-graders at West View Elementary had been unanimous. This leopard woman clearly ate kittens for breakfast and mice for snacks.
After days of tortured nightmares, she had finally worked up the nerve to warn her father that Mrs. Murchison was raising cats for food. For unfathomable reasons, however, he had found this amusing, and the issue was never spoken of again. At least not until Leigh was twelve and learned that Lilah Murchison was so paranoid about rabies and parasites that she insisted every creature her pets dragged home be thoroughly tested for both.
Leigh’s adult fingers clenched the cage bars involuntarily as she remembered. Lilah Murchison might not have been a devil woman, then or now, but nor was she Mother Goose. Twenty-five years later, she and her prize-winning Siamese were still clients of the clinic, and she was a very wealthy widow. She was also rumored to be a black one.
Leigh straightened. Could Ricky Rhodis have intended to steal one of her Siamese from the clinic? If so, who did he plan to "return" it to?
"Leigh?" came a masculine voice from the stairs. She turned to see her father's gray, bespectacled head leaning down just below ceiling level. "Nancy told me you were here. Come on up."
She let go of the cat cage and took a deep, apprehensive breath. Randall was fair, but consummately practical, and her credibility with him was—well, somewhat limited.
Adith Rhodis was going to owe her.
Chapter 2
"Preposterous." Randall Koslow removed the latest in a long line of cheap dark-plastic glasses, which, when observed in concert with his rail-thin frame and studious nature, made him look startlingly like the father of Dennis the Menace. He rubbed his eyes wearily and took another bite of his turkey on white—hold the mayo. "I feel very sorry for Mrs. Rhodis, but she's going to have to face facts. Better the boy get help now."
Leigh studied her father's determined face and wished she could think up another line of reasoning for why Ricky Rhodis should be let off the hook. Unfortunately, she couldn't. "You don't think it's even a remote possibility that Ricky might have intended to snatch one of Mrs. Murchison's Siamese?" she tried again. "Maybe for a rival breeder? Or wait—I’ve got it. The wife of her latest lover is out for revenge."
Randall lowered his eyebrows in a frown. In stark contrast to the women in his family, he was strictly a no-nonsense individual, and his daughter's attempts at levity were not scoring points.
"Okay, okay," Leigh relented. "That's a little much, I grant you. I'm just trying to establish reasonable doubt here."
He smiled patiently, then let out a small sigh. "The female cat was a grand champion in her time, but she's well beyond breeding age, much less showing age. As for the male, you couldn't give him away. He's a medical nightmare. In fact—"
"Dr. Koslow?"
An individual the size of a fifth grader poked her head into the exam room where Randall and Leigh had paused for his stand-up lunch break. "Sorry to interrupt," she apologized brusquely, moving toward them.
Leigh stared at the stranger with undisguised curiosity. Any other female cursed with such a small frame would seem elfish, but this one's army-short hair, intense gray eyes, and unaccountable swagger somehow pulled off machismo. Her bulging muscles didn’t hurt, either. "I need to talk to you," the woman ordered, holding Randall's gaze in a deadlock. "It's about Mrs. Murchison."
Leigh’s eyes widened. Leopard-woman was a popular topic today.
Randall took one look at his visitor’s face, stuffed the remainder of his sandwich into the trash bin, and pointed to a chair. "Have a seat," he answered. "This is my daughter, Leigh. Leigh, this is Nikki Loomis, Jared's sister. She works for Lilah Murchison. Her personal assistant now, I believe."
The two women nodded in greeting, though Nikki's nod was more of a sharp bob, and Leigh found herself fighting an urge to salute. She knew it wasn't charitable of her to besmirch the character of the unknown Mrs. Loomis, but she had an awfully hard time believing there was any shared gene pool between this woman and the gentle giant downstairs. She was further amazed that the clinic’s own kennel worker had a sister who worked for Lilah Murchison. Nobody worked for Lilah Murchison. Getting on her staff was like applying for the secret service.
"Don't know how to say this," Nikki began with a clipped, militant tone. "But you may have heard on the news—a private plane went down yesterday over Lake Michigan."
Randall shook his head.
"Well, one did. And I got a call last night saying Mrs. Murchison was on it."
Leigh’s stomach flip-flopped. News of plane crashes always did that to her, whether she knew anyone involved or not. And while she couldn’t claim to have known Lilah Murchison well, she nevertheless felt a strong need for denial. Gorgeous, savvy, arguably evil women like Lilah did not die without warning. They merely disappeared for a while and came back with different husbands.
The veterinarian cleared his throat. "You're certain?"
Nikki's head moved sharply from side to side. "Can't be, not yet. But she did call from New York yesterday morning. Said that she and her friend, Bertha McClintock, were going to take the McClintock company jet to Minneapolis." She paused briefly. "They were going to the Mall of America."
No one spoke for a moment, and Leigh let out a breath. Lilah Murchison—dead? She generally tried not to obsess over local gossip, but the yarns implanted during her formative years still held a certain power over her. And the web of this spider was large indeed.
Lilah Murchison’s life was nothing short of legend—providing fifty years’ worth of titillating conversation everywhere from happy hour at the Chuckwagon to luncheon with the North Boros Women's Club. Born to one of the poorest families in the working-class borough of Avalon, Lilah had spent the last thirty years in one of the finest old-money mansions in Ben Avon, the upscale community just down the river. And in getting there she hadn't just burned her bridges, she had pulverized them. Her path to wealth had been paved with the trampled torsos of virtually everyone she had grown up with—not to mention the bodies of three dead husbands—and her crimes against humanity and decency were known the length of the Ohio's north bank. Kitten-ea
ter or no, Lilah Murchison was one creepy dame.
Unless, of course, one took the opinion of Randall Koslow. "I’m very sorry to hear that," he said sincerely. "She was a good client and a fine woman. My sympathies to her son."
Nikki Loomis's eyes narrowed somewhat, their gray depths flashing. Leigh knew very little about Lilah’s son, but she was guessing there were things to know. "Dean will get over it," the personal assistant snapped. "But there's nothing we can do now except wait. Bits of the plane have been found, but it went down in some pretty deep water, and they say they may never find the bodies."
Aha. Leigh tried to stop herself from spinning bizarre alternative scenarios in her head, but she knew resistance was pointless. Her brain minded her commands about as well as Mao Tse did. "Was there a passenger list?" she inquired innocently—or so she hoped.
Nikki turned on her with a frown, absently flexing an unnaturally thick bicep. "Not that I heard of. But two employees at the airport say they saw a thin, blond woman in her sixties get on with Mrs. McClintock. And one mentioned that she was hauling a cat carrier." She turned back to Randall. "You know Ms. Lilah never went anywhere without Mrs. Wiggs."
The veterinarian nodded soberly. "True. She was devoted to all her pets." He paused thoughtfully. "Speaking of which—do you have any idea if she made arrangements for them?"
"No, and her estate's going to be a real mess because of the wait for a death certificate. But her son’s been bugging the lawyer about reading her will, and it looks like the guy’s agreed because Ms. Lilah’s got so much stuff that has to be dealt with. Of course," she added heavily, "nothing's going to be changing hands until she's declared legally dead."
"Who will be taking care of the cats, then?" Randall asked.